He lingers on notions of class. Who are these office workers, exactly? Somehow they are “neither of the working class nor of the elite holders of capital.” They dress well; they’re clean and pale, as aristocrats once were.

Can we refer to office workers, as some do, as knowledge workers? Perhaps not. Mr. Saval quotes Peter Drucker, the management consultant, who said: “They expect to be ‘intellectuals.’ And they find that they are just ‘staff.’ ” The author says it out loud:

We have no problem in this country rewarding individuals of color momentarily as a way never to address structural cannibalistic inequalities that are faced by the communities these people come out of. …I am representative of a structural exclusion that room is made for “ones” so that room does not have to be made for the “manies”.

“The person gives up a portion of his life in exchange for a symbol of that portion. This symbol, which is money, then obtains a subjective power so that it determines the lives of the people whose activities it represents. A money economy is one in which people are ruled by a fetishized representation of themselves. A market economy is one ruled by this ghostly dead but supernaturally active power called money.”